Slack's next funding round of up to $160M will value company at $2.8B, to include new investors IVP, Horizons Ventures, Index Ventures, DST Global
after just five months http://blogs.wsj.com/... http://graphics.wsj.com/... scoop by @dmac1 Collision Conf / @collisionhq : Slack's Valuation More Than Doubles to $2.8 Billion in Five Months. See their Co-Founder at #CollisionConf: http://blogs.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @howardlindzon : Venture capitalists yell bubble on TV and than slide $160 million into Slack - the media is the sucker http://blogs.wsj.com/... $slack @wsjd : Slack's new $160 million in funding values it at $2.76 billion. 5 months ago investors valued Slack at $1.12 billionhttp://blogs.wsj.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Three days after Bloomberg reported Slack was in funding talks at a $2 billion-plus value, the Wall Street Journal confirms the round: up to $160 million from new investors IVP, Horizons Ventures, Index Ventures and DST Global, pricing the company at about $2.8 billion. That is roughly 2.5x the $1.12 billion investors set just five months earlier — the fastest re-rating yet for the workplace-chat company.
What makes the jump credible rather than froth, at least to the buyers, is usage: Slack is converting free teams into paid seats fast enough that late-stage funds are willing to pay the markup sight unseen. The question this round answers is how long that cadence can hold.
First-order effects
- Slack banks up to $160M while bringing four new institutional names — IVP, Horizons Ventures, Index Ventures, DST Global — onto its cap table at a ~$2.8B entry price.
- Existing holders mark their stakes up more than 2x on a five-month-old valuation, without any liquidity event.
Second-order effects
- The markup invites the next tranche: within a year Slack raises $200M more at $3.8B, disclosing 2.7M daily active users of which 800K are paid, and by September 2017 SoftBank's Vision Fund leads $250M at $5.1B — each round pulling bigger, later-stage capital into an enterprise SaaS asset.
- Rival collaboration vendors face a competitor armed with a war chest sized for land-grab spending on sales and product, raising the cost of staying in the category.
Third-order effects
- By April 2019, private-market shares of Slack trade at prices implying ~$16B, more than 2x its last funding round ahead of a mid-year IPO — a widening gap between marked round valuations and what secondary buyers will actually pay that becomes the defining feature of late-stage tech finance.
- The pattern cements mega-funds (DST Global here, SoftBank later) as the marginal price-setters for hot enterprise startups, compressing the interval between rounds from years to months.
The trend: Enterprise SaaS leaders are repricing in months rather than years as late-stage capital floods in, decoupling private valuations from funded rounds on the road to IPO.